Risk Assessment in ERP Project by COPRAS Method Under Fuzzy Environment

Abstract

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects are prone to risk from the strategic, operational, technical and organizational perspective. The assessment of project risks is a challenging task for project managers and is considered in a class of a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. In this work, an MCDM approach has been presented for risk assessment in ERP project by COPRAS under fuzzy environment where the vagueness and subjectivity are handled with linguistic terms parameterized by triangular fuzzy number. Fuzzy COPRAS (COPRAS-F) has been used to determine the weight of risk criteria and then prioritize the risk factor based on the calculated weight of criteria. The prioritized risk factors have been classified in scale from almost certain to rare risks. The proposed approach is illustrated with a real case studying fertilizer plant and the associated results have been compared with fuzzy TOPSIS technique. The result of this study demonstrates that excessive customization, ineffective consulting services experiences, complex architecture and high number of modules, poor project team skills, inadequate change management, inadequate ERP selection, ineffective strategic thinking and planning, poor leadership, lack of business process re-engineering and low-key user involvement are top ten risks that need to be mitigated to avoid failure of ERP project.